i've taken to running apt inside eatmydata, makes it run way faster since it doesn't call fsync constantly. granted, you could end up in an invalid state if the power goes out, but that's what UPSs, laptop batteries and backups are for :)
people always complain about nvidia drivers on linux, but personally my experience has never required anything more than sudo apt install nvidia-driver
i would generally recommend XFS over ext4 for anything where a CoW filesystem isn't needed. in my experience, it performs better than ext4 at most workloads, and still supports some nifty features like reflink copies if you want them.
ZFS lacks some features that btrfs has, such as creating CoW clones of individual files (rather than having to snapshot a whole subvolume).
personally i've been using btrfs on pretty much everything for about two years, ranging from multiple >100TB filesystems spanning 8 spinning rust drives to individual flash drives and had very few issues (compared to my experiences with ext4 on mdadm). snapshots/reflink copies have made many of my workflows much easier, adding/removing/replacing devices pretty much Just Work™, and the fact that everything is checksummed gives me a piece of mind i didn't know i needed. sure, ZFS has pretty much the same featureset, but it's not in the mainline kernel and seems to lack some of btrfs' flexibility (from the research i've done in the past, like adding/removing disks to an existing pool is still experimental).
what i'm really excited for is bcachefs, which takes what i consider the best features of both btrfs and ZFS and then steps them up a notch (e.g. ability to configure RAID settings and prefer specific drives on a per-file/per-directory level). as soon as it's stable enough to be mainlined i'll definitely be migrating most of my btrfs filesystems to that.
nouveau is hardly better than software rendering in most cases. heck, for pretty much every GPU from the last decade, it isn't even able to adjust the GPU clock frequency (so it's permanently stuck on the lowest frequency).
Personally, I've been running Debian everywhere (both on my servers and for desktop use) for a few years and I've found it much more reliable than Ubuntu. Sure, the repos tend to be somewhat out-of-date (unless you're on testing, which I've started using more and more and have yet to experience any actual problems with), but most of the time it makes no difference and if I really need the latest version of something I can just spin up a Docker container.
i've taken to running apt inside
eatmydata, makes it run way faster since it doesn't call fsync constantly. granted, you could end up in an invalid state if the power goes out, but that's what UPSs, laptop batteries and backups are for :)